Negotiating the Intersections of Masculinity, Disability, and Normative Gender Roles in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands: The Tragedy of the Self-Made Man

Abstract

This essay focuses on minority-identifying consciousness as a metaphor inciting division and Otherness. It explores how normative masculine ideology stems from places of power, privilege, and hierarchy; and as such, from a white, heteronormative, patriarchal framework where the sociopolitical Other languishes in the cultural periphery of liminal existence. I also discuss how the U.S./Mexico border asserts a system of binary opposition, enforcing who belongs and who does not by way of policing the various ways in which we negotiate identity. The chapter ultimately examines the nexus within the cultural and gender-formative selves, and the intersections of masculinity and cultural identity, all of which are juxtaposed against the subject of psychosocial disability—subjects considered taboo within the Latinx cultural community.